Toolemera Blog

Digital Archiving, Or, Tell Me It Ain't So

Over on Google+ there arose the question of how do I handle archiving digital stuff? It's a question that arises every now and then on this blog and a question that bedevils archivists, librarians and IT people daily.

Now that I'm retired from that whole hulabaloo, I can safely say there is no answer. There is no safe way to preserve digital material. Eventually, it will all degrade, corrupt, be unreadable, hardware will become outmoded, software out of date, media will get all kinds of rot and viruses will do who knows what. It's all just a pack of bits and bytes.

It's nothing real and that's the truth. You can back up your hard disc, keep multiple copies of your media, use the Cloud but it's still nothing more than a bunch of negatives and positives pretending to be something real. It's not a piece of paper, a photograph, a book, a film or whatever. That eBook of yours is only as good as your eReader is. That image is only as good as that piece of software is at interpreting the data to make it look like something other than a bunch of 1's and 0's. Sorry folks but that's the reality of the digital world.

So what do you do? What do I do?

I scan at 300 dpi, rgb, descreen if it's a halftone image or image containing engraved elements with an output to TIFF. That's my master file and that goes into storage of sorts. Storage for me is a Samsung 1 Tb hard disc just for graphic files. I run various backups to other hard discs and DVD's (Taiyo Uden or Verbatim) and hope for the best. When one hard disc fills, I mount it in an OWC external kit and place a new Samsung disc in my trusty Mac Pro tower.

If the original is going to be destroyed after imaging, as when the original is full of fungus or too fragile to maintain, a full color copy is printed at a local print shop on archival paper. That copy goes in my files as the hard copy master.

If I'm photographing an original, I take the highest setting possible, raw if I can and then convert to TIFF in Photoshop Elements. I don't work in RAW because there are too many problems across software working in RAW. TIFF is read by everything and everything likes TIFF.

Why TIFF? Because TIFF is lossless. Jpeg is lossly, meaning that every time you "save as" you lose some data and some detail, a very bad thing. PNG is lossless but it simply does not produce the same quality images that a TIFF file does. Same goes for Jpeg2000. Jpeg2000 was supposed to be the saving grace of the graphics world. Maybe it is. But not for my purposes. It's too buggy across software and so I avoid it.

Once I have worked over a TIFF image in Photoshop Elements and feel it's ready for show, I convert to grayscale if needed, then to jpeg and upload it. If the image will simply be archived, the TIFF file is named and stored. I'm working on a decent cataloging system but haven't figured out what yet so I can't comment on that conundrum.

That is that when it comes to me and digital archiving.

Till next, Gary

 

Publishing Secrets Revealed!

I checked in with Soupy Sales for permission and he agreed to my using his marketing scheme. Get your parents wallet, take one dollar and send it to me, courtesy The Studio and I will send to you my Proven Way To Millions (of farthings) In Publishing or, How To Grow A Groucho Marx Mustache In Three Easy Steps.

If you're too impatient to do so, or to chicken to steal from your parents or you haven't learnt how to address an envelope yet, I'll take pity on you and provide some tidbits on how to produce a nicely done pdf. Bear in mind these are my opinions, my workflows, my way of doing things and as such, may have little to do with the way you chose to do things. This Way is based on what Lightning Source asks for as well as many other print shops I've worked with. It's vital to check with your printer to find out what specs they require for the particular machinery they use.

A Bit About Digital Imaging

Over on SaveEndicott, a blog devoted to the advancement of the Dedham Public Library, I posted a copy of a forum response, which response also answers, to a small extent, some questions which have been posed to me from this blog. As usual, I've been reading some mid 19th C books, hence what today we would consider to be a run-on sentence, but what was commonplace 150 years ago.

Rather than post the entire post, I've elected to only post the link to the post:

http://toolemerablog.typepad.com/saveendicott/2010/11/a-bit-about-digital-imaging.html

Till next, Gary

Carriagemakers Tool Chest Dimensions

Zach has posted the dimensions of his Carriagemakers tool chest, along with photographs of the construction details. With luck, a Sketchup model will be available soon.

For all the focus on workbenches, I really have to say I'm more interested in tool chest of all sorts. Isn't it about time there was a concerted effort to get images and dimensions of tool chests on the web?

Till next, Gary

PNG. Gesundheit.

PNG. Possibly Nutritional Granola, which somehow sticks in my head more than Portable Network Graphics does. Or possibly an offshoot of some radical political movement. If you really want to know more about PNG, read it's Wiki. I'm certainly not going to attempt to figure out all the meanings of the tech-talk comparing PNG to JPEG to GIF to TIFF. All I care about is how the file format works and what the end result is.

When I first tried out the PNG image format a few years back, it failed miserably in the creation of PDF files in Acrobat. For that matter, when attempting to work with it in Photoshop, my results never seemed to match what was in my head. Over the past year or two, Acrobat has come a long way in it's ability to handle PNG. It may or not be intentional, but there it is. Acrobat 9 does a good job of converting PNG into PDF files.

On the Photoshop Elements side of things, PE does a great job of adjusting levels, contrast and shadows in PNG. I simply scan to TIFF and batch convert in PE to PNG. I have Acrobat set to process PNG files as Monochrome lossless, Grayscale high quality and Color high quality. The output looks great and behaves nicely when various size reduction processes are tried. PNG files are processed into PDF files seamlessly and quickly. What more could I ask?

Don't get me wrong now. I still swear by TIFF as a master file. Not Jpeg 2000, whatever the pundits say. TIFF is still my primary imaging output format. The problem is, trying to get a PDF created from TIFF files down to a reasonable size is a pain. Both TIFF and PNG files are converted into Jpeg files when Acrobat creates a PDF. For whatever the technical reasons are, starting with a PNG file produces a smaller file from the getgo. The less size reduction actions I have to go through, the more the liklihood the end result will look like the beginning. Just smaller.

I am sure some imaging guru out there can explain the why's and wherefore's but honestly, it doesn't matter to me. What matters are the end results. 

Till next, Gary